When Christmas Comes Early: Yoshi’s Adoption Story

Imagine you’re taking out the trash one winter morning. As you’re about to toss your trash into the dumpster, you hear something — a tiny meow — coming from inside the dumpster.

Fortunately, the woman who heard that tiny cry for help knew what she had to do. She brought the kitten to a shelter.

Patti was working at that shelter in early December 2007, when that woman brought the kitten in.

He wouldn’t move and his pupils were huge, so the staff wondered if he had been poisoned. Patti offered to foster the kitten; it was the 1-year anniversary of her father’s death, and she felt like this was good timing.

After she brought him home, the kitten just sat on her lap and wouldn’t move. Patti named him Kiyoshi (nicknamed Yoshi), which is the Japanese word for “calm.” For a week Kiyoshi wouldn’t move; she says it was almost like he was frozen.

Patti was Kiyoshi’s Godsend at the beginning. She’d feed him from her hand and take him to the litter box. About a week later he began to walk on his own, when it became clear that he not only had CH, he was also blind.

Obviously, Patti ended up adopting Kiyoshi, and she says she would adopt another CH kitty in a heartbeat.

“They are very sweet little souls who seem to appreciate what we do for them,” Patti says.

I get very annoyed (and saddened) with those who think CH, blind and otherwise disabled animals should be put down, put in dumpsters to die a slow painful death, etc. Shame to them! To think the disabled (animals & people) are without any purpose is to close one’s eyes to anything but ‘perfect’, which is an empty and shallow philosophy. Sadly, our society condones that ideal. Those that believe that way will go through life without ever learning life’s greatest lessons, and it is certainly their loss.